Next of Kin (2 page)

The land proved, as he had hoped, reasonable for growing fodder for the cattle; grass on the lower slopes, maize on the higher ones. In spring, when the willows that lined the river banks were in soft, new, frond-like leaf, the landscape had a brief prettiness, and if the winter was wet, the river rose to flood as much as a quarter of the acreage, and mute swans arrived in pairs to lend the prospect a stately, almost park-like air. But at other times – and Caro Meredith had felt this sorely – the fields were just land, spaces of earth and grass divided by untidy hedges and fences with ugly, serviceable galvanized-metal gates opening on to the quagmires of mud the cattle and the wheels of tractors made.

The house stood at a mid-point between the river and the minor road down which the milk tanker came daily to empty the bulk tank outside the milking parlour. It was approached by a sloping track, either sticky with mud or cloudy with dust, along which Robin had planted, in a fit of early enthusiasm, alternate green and copper beech trees. At the end of the track, a concreted stretch led away on one side into the yard, and on the other a wooden five-barred gate, propped permanently open with a mossy boulder, gave on to a circular sweep of worn gravel in front of the house. There was a sundial in the centre of the sweep, with an engraved metal plate bolted to its surface. ‘Onlie count,' the engraving ran, ‘the sunny houres.' Caro had put it there. It had been her first Christmas present to Robin.

The drive now was full of cars. From over the pungent hedge of leylandii that screened it from the farmyard came the steady clank and whirr of the milking parlour where a relief milker, an efficient, sour-faced man sent by the local agency, proceeded with the afternoon milking. Robin, standing in the doorway to greet people with his funeral tie at half-mast, fought down the urge to go and see that the job was being done properly and that Gareth, Tideswell's herdsman, had indeed mended the puncture in the power hose as instructed.

Behind him, in the gloomy dining room he and Caro had seldom used, a vast funeral tea was spread out on Meredith family cloths, lent by Dilys. Judy, her red hair tousled and still in her black overcoat, was pouring tea, and Lyndsay was handing it round to people, the sugar basin in her free hand. There was an air of discreet excitement in the room at the sight of the food, unfashionable, childlike, teatime food, resting on mats of decoratively pierced white paper which Dilys had brought down to Tideswell and made plain she expected to be used.

Judy, struggling to make the pecan squares and chocolate brownies that had been so much part of Caro's American repertoire, had said defiantly that her mother never used doilies.

‘But this is a funeral,' Dilys said. ‘A family funeral. We must do it properly.'

She emphasized the word ‘family'. She had made several cakes, huge perfect fruit cakes glistening with cherries, flawless pale sponges decorated with improbably symmetrical segments of crystallized fruit. They lay on the kitchen table in hygienic plastic boxes, formidably professional, resolutely in the tradition of farmers' wives to whom anything not home-made is anathema.

‘A family funeral, dear,' Dilys said again.

She had looked at Judy, at her long frame which might have come from either of her parents had they been her true parents; at her untidy red head and broad pale features, which certainly mightn't. Robin was as dark as Harry had once been, with Dilys's own father's narrow, harsh features. And Caro had been all brown – brown hair and eyes and pale-brown skin, even in winter. Not an English skin, Dilys had always thought, and certainly not a Meredith one. Even Joe's wife Lyndsay, with all that pale hair and those light eyes no Meredith had ever had, had skin not unlike Dilys's own; fine skin, clear-coloured. But Judy looked like none of them. Was like none of them.

‘Take your coat off, dear,' Dilys said now.

‘I'm cold,' Judy said. ‘I'm cold from crying.'

‘Leave her, Ma,' Joe said. He put an arm across Judy's shoulders. ‘Leave her. You talk to the Vicar.'

Judy said in a fierce whisper, ‘I never want to be buried like that.'

‘Nor me.' He took his arm away. ‘Burnt and scattered for me. Particularly scattered.'

She picked up the vast brown two-handled teapot, borrowed from Dean Cross village hall.

‘On the farm?'

‘No fear,' Joe said, ‘in the river. Not on the bloody farm.'

Robin said beside them, ‘Who's the woman in the scarf?'

Joe reached past Judy and took a slice of cake off a plate.

‘Cornelius. A Mrs Cornelius. Bought the Chambers' old place. Rich and dippy. Caro used to visit her.'

Robin looked at him.

‘Did she? Why? How do you know?'

Joe shrugged, holding one hand below the other to catch the cake crumbs.

‘Dunno. Just did. She visited a lot of people.'

‘She liked people,' Judy said, almost angrily. ‘She
liked
them. All kinds of people.' She shot a look at Robin. ‘Remember?'

He looked away from her. He looked across this table that he had rescued from a derelict chicken farm on the other side of the county – mahogany, nineteenth century, with nicely turned legs, being used as a perch in a barn – and saw his mother talking to the Vicar, and Mrs Cornelius talking to Gareth's wife, Debbie, and his sister-in-law Lyndsay, characteristically pushing combs back into her cloudy masses of hair, talking to three women Caro used to work with, competent women in their forties, competent women in competent clothes. He thought briefly, with a stab of longing and possible relief, of the milking parlour. Then he thought of what Judy had just said. ‘Remember?' she'd said, as if it were a charge; ‘Remember?' as if he'd forgotten in only a week, the week since Caro had died in Stretton Hospital of a brain tumour, what she was like, what she had loved and hated, what she had been. The trouble is, Robin thought, detaching his gaze from Lyndsay's hair and allowing it to drift out towards the damp spring sky through the imperfectly cleaned windows, that it's too soon. It's too soon to remember because she hasn't gone yet. At least, not what was left of her. What didn't go years back. He held his teacup out to Judy.

‘Please,' he said.

‘No-one from Carolyn's family?' the Vicar said to Dilys. ‘No-one from America?'

Dilys offered him a sandwich.

‘Her father's dead. And her mother's in a wheelchair. Two strokes. And she's not seventy.'

The Vicar, who would have preferred cake, which he was never given at home, took a sandwich.

‘Brothers and sisters?'

‘Not that I know of.'

‘Sad, isn't it,' the Vicar said, looking despondently at his sandwich, ‘to die in a country that isn't your own and with nobody from home by you.' He had said this to his wife the night before, who had replied that it must have happened to Victorian missionaries all the time. There had been an edge of longing to her voice. She had wanted him to be a missionary, and when he had firmly declined in favour of provincial parish priesthood, had flung herself into forging her own links with Christian communities in Africa. The sitting-room of the Dean Cross Vicarage was full of African artefacts, masks and statues and beaded hangings in red and black. The Vicar would have preferred water-colours, of boats.

‘Very sad,' Dilys said, not thinking of Caro, but thinking how terrible it would be if she, Dilys, had to die away from Dean Place Farm, away from people who knew the Merediths.

‘I've never been to America,' the Vicar said. He looked at the nearest cake.

‘Nor me,' Dilys said.

‘But I felt I knew something of it sometimes. From Carolyn.'

‘Oh?' Dilys said. She was eyeing Lyndsay, willing her to stop talking so absorbedly and do a little handing round. It was important to eat after funerals, to remind yourself of living. And to drink. She hoped Robin had remembered the sherry.

‘Yes,' the Vicar said. He thought of those times Caro had sat in his study and asked him to find ways of accommodation for her, ways of coming to terms without complete submission, without the sacrifice of her deepest instincts.

‘They're good people,' he had said to her, of the Merediths.

‘What's good? Not being fornicators and abusers of the weak?'

‘It's having integrity,' he had said. ‘And principles. They do their duty.'

She'd said sadly, ‘But that isn't enough. Is it?' and when he had stayed silent, she had insisted, more vehemently, ‘Is it? Is it?'

He looked at Dilys now, grey hair waved, dark suit brushed, concentration given over entirely to the proper management of the funeral tea.

He said, only half meaning to, ‘No, it isn't.'

Dilys didn't hear him. She was gesturing across the table to Robin with those well-kept, deft, domestic hands, a tiny drinking gesture.

‘Sherry?' she mouthed. ‘Time for sherry.'

Later, in the car returning to their modern brick house on the edge of Dean Place Farm, Lyndsay said, ‘We should have brought Judy back with us.'

‘Couldn't do that,' Joe said. ‘Couldn't leave Robin alone.'

Lyndsay took the combs out of her hair and put them between her teeth. Then she bent her head so that her hair fell forward over her face. Joe was right. Of course he was. Yet there was something about Robin that seemed to contribute to his own loneliness, to conspire to leave him in it, whatever one did – or didn't do – to try and help. She always thought of him as alone, somehow, driving alone, farming alone, standing alone at Stretton Market watching his cattle go through the ring. He was the only one of the Merediths to go in for cattle, too. Harry and Joe were arable farmers, as Harry's father and grandfather had been before them, tenant farmers on the same 250 acres even if the landlord had changed over the years from being a private individual to a company, a local manufacturing company, who had bought up several farms in the early seventies, when the price of land was low. Robin wouldn't be a tenant. Robin wanted to buy.

‘Let him,' Harry had said. ‘I shan't stop him, but I shan't help him either.'

Yet when Joe had needed a house for himself and Lyndsay, Harry had paid for that. He'd done a deal with the landlord and Lyndsay had been shown the plans, spread out on the table at Dean Place Farm.

‘Utility room,' Dilys had said, pointing. ‘Southern aspect. It'll make a lovely home.'

Lyndsay took the combs out of her mouth and shoved them back into her scoops of hair. It occurred to her, thinking of Robin, that Joe was solitary, too, in his way. She never quite knew what he was thinking, whether he was happy or sad. She knew he liked it when he was more successful than other arable farmers in the district, but that wasn't happiness, that was merely competitive triumph. Yet there was nothing odd in that, not round here. It might be difficult to get Joe to talk except on a factual level, but most farmers were like that, most farmers she knew didn't
talk.
Not like women talked. Or at least, some women. Dilys didn't talk that way either. She talked, as Harry and Joe did, about what was going on, on the farm, in the village. Happiness and unhappiness were for Dilys, Lyndsay thought, like the weather; emotions that happened or didn't happen, which were unpredictable and which, above all, had to be borne. If Dilys, in the manner of most wives, had ever had a moment of wanting to strangle Harry, she would have bided her time to let it pass, like waiting for the rain to stop. If you went to Dilys and said that you couldn't quite explain it, but you had the distinct sensation of being at the end of your tether, she would suggest you made chutney, or washed some blankets. Life had to be got through, great lumps of it pushed behind you, undigested if necessary. Life wasn't for battling with; the farm was there for that.

‘Don't dwell on it,' Dilys would say to Lyndsay. ‘Don't brood.' Had she ever said that to Caro?

‘Will he be OK?'

‘Robin?' Joe said. ‘In time, I should think so. In time—'

Lyndsay said shyly, ‘You were fond of Caro, weren't you?'

There was a small pause, then Joe said, ‘She made a change. Being American.'

Joe had been to America for a year, after agricultural college. Harry hadn't seemed to require him to take a serious job during that year – Robin had noticed this in silence – so Joe had roamed the great distances at will, picking up casual work in bars and diners and on farms in order to buy his passage onward. At one point, seduced by a girl and the mountains of Colorado, he had thought he might stay, but after a few weeks, he seemed to recollect his own legacy of knowing the difference between land and landscape, and had called from Denver to say he would be home by Christmas.

It was then that Robin had announced he was going in for cattle. One evening, at supper in the kitchen of Dean Place Farm, he had said that he had come to a decision, and that he'd be leaving home to start a dairy herd, and maybe a few beef cattle, too. Harry had put his knife and fork down and, in the harsh glare of the overhead light which Dilys saw no reason to soften because it was practical to work by, looked at his wife. Then he looked, much less intently, at Robin, and then he picked up his knife and fork again.

‘Done your sums?' he said.

‘Yes.'

Dilys held out a bowl of buttered cabbage.

‘Joe will be home soon,' she said.

‘I know.'

Robin waited for one of his parents to say that there wasn't room for all three Meredith men on Dean Place Farm, but they didn't. He took a spoonful of cabbage and said, rather more harshly than he meant to, ‘I want to do it, and it'll leave space for Joe.'